"YAG" 2005 Obituary

YAGEL o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-07-23 published
James DOOHAN,
Soldier And Actor: 1920-2005
He was an 'accidental actor' who got his start when he stumbled
into a radio station in London, Ontario He found fame as Scotty
on Star Trek, but not before he had already experienced real-life
heroics on D-Day
By Tom HAWTHORN,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, July
23, 2005, Page S9
'Och, Cap'n, Scotty cannae work for ye any more."
Star Trek's chief engineer, Lt.-Cmdr. Montgomery Scott, was irascible,
excitable and prone to delivering dire warnings in a Scots burr.
As portrayed by Canadian James
DOOHAN,
Scotty became a favourite
of the cult television program's legions of fans.
Many assumed the actor shared traits with his character, but
out of his red uniform, Mr.
DOOHAN was a serious actor with a
substantial list of credits. As a young man, he led soldiers
as part of the D-Day invasion in an attack which he later described
as "giving Hitler the finger."
Mr. DOOHAN's chief engineer character cursed dilithium crystals
and coaxed power from overstressed warp-drive engines on the
Starship Enterprise. The order to be beamed aboard was directed
at Mr. DOOHAN; "
Beam me up, Scotty" became a cultural catchphrase,
as well as the punchline to innumerable jokes. Mr.
DOOHAN became
so associated with the command that he used it as the title of
his autobiography.
Yet, the program's dedicated fans -- their numbers legion and
their allegiance bordering on the fanatical -- insist no character
ever uttered the phrase. "Beam me up, Scotty" is to Star Trek
what "Play it again, Sam" is to Casablanca.
After the original series ended following a three-year run, Mr.
DOOHAN was upset at being typecast as the irascible engineer
with the unforgettable burr. After all, he had earlier performed
Shakespeare under the direction of Mavor Moore and won notice
for his performances in dramas telecast by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corp. He eventually made peace with the character, whom he portrayed
in subsequent feature films. He also became a frequent and well-received
guest at Star Trek conventions.
A first-class mimic, Mr.
DOOHAN tested eight accents when auditioning
for the role. "Well, if you want an engineer," he told Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry, "it had better be a Scotsman." Mr.
DOOHAN settled on a dialect he described as an Aberdeen brogue.
Scotty's accent, it has been noted by one newspaper, fooled no
one north of Berwick-upon-Tweed, let alone a Scotsman. Yet the
near-comic urgency of his delivery compelled many fans into worshipful
imitation. The actor named the character after his maternal grandfather,
James MONTGOMERY, a sea captain.
In many ways, Mr.
DOOHAN imbued the chief engineer with what
could be described as Canadian qualities. His practical warnings
("In four hours, the ship blows up") and excitable protestations
("Ah canna change the laws of physics") always gave way to a
resourceful fortitude in completing a task, however dangerous
or improbable.
The actor may have drawn on his own experiences as a veteran
of the Second World War. He was wounded during the D-Day invasion
of Normandy in an incident he described as "giving Hitler the
finger."
Those who found his accent unconvincing were not surprised to
learn he traced his Scottish roots to an ancestor who lived three
centuries ago. He was Irish by heritage and Canadian by birth.
James Montgomery
DOOHAN, conceived in Belfast, was born in Vancouver
on March 3, 1920. His parents and three older siblings had just
emigrated to Canada, arriving in Halifax on New Year's Day.
In his 1996 autobiography, Mr.
DOOHAN describes his father as
a dentist, pharmacist, veterinarian and drunkard. His memories
were of a household made unhappy by his father's alcohol-fuelled
rages. The family moved to Sarnia, Ontario, when the boy was
6. Two years later, while serving as an altar boy at a Catholic
mass, Jimmy suddenly felt delirious and was rushed from church.
He was diagnosed with diphtheria.
Around home, he was known to imitate the voices he heard on the
radio or at the cinema. At 16, he played the title role in a
school production of Robin Hood at Sarnia Collegiate Institute
and Technical School.
Eager to leave home, he enlisted as a gunner in the Royal Canadian
Artillery immediately after Canada declared war on Germany on
September 10, 1939. After learning Morse code and earning a commission
as an officer, Mr.
DOOHAN spent two frustrating years in training
in England. He served as a general's aide-de-camp during the
planning for the Dieppe raid.
On June 6, 1944, Mr.
DOOHAN commanded 120 men of D Company of
the Royal Winnipeg Rifles. In the early morning of D-Day, he
joined the landings on Juno Beach. While he saw a captain go
insane and another man suffer a grievous stomach wound, Mr.
DOOHAN
managed to lead his men to the seaside village of Graye-sur-Mer
without casualty.
Soon, however, they came under fire from a machine-gun lodged
in a church tower. Mr.
DOOHAN, a command post officer by rank,
borrowed a rifle. His first shot missed, but each of the next
two shots felled a German soldier and the nest went silent. He
never learned whether he had killed or wounded the enemy.
Shortly before midnight, Mr.
DOOHAN was walking to his command
post when a "machine-gun opened up on us. It hit me and spun
me around. Staggering, I fell down into the shell hole," he wrote
in his autobiography. "Then I looked at my right hand and saw
the blood covering it. I could see the holes in my middle finger."
He walked to a regimental aid post where it was discovered four
bullets had also imbedded in his left leg. In his shock at the
three shots that smashed his right hand, Mr.
DOOHAN hadn't even
noticed the other wounds.
He examined the rest of his uniform, discovering a bullet hole
in his shirt. He reached his left hand to his right breast pocket.
"I pulled out the sterling silver cigarette case that my brother
Bill had given me when I was his best man. And there I discovered
a dent in it.
"The bullet had come in at an angle, ricocheted off the cigarette
case, and bounced away. Four inches from my heart."
The finger was amputated. Years later, Star Trek fans would detail
scenes in which the absence of the digit is noticeable. For his
part, Mr. DOOHAN was always self-conscious about the loss. He
often subtly camouflaged his right hand.
After six years in uniform, he was left with few plans for the
future at the end of war. He became an actor by accident. Annoyed
by poor performances in a radio drama, Mr.
DOOHAN went to radio
station CFPL in London, Ontario, to record himself reading from
Shakespeare and other works. He disliked what he heard, but an
enthusiastic sound engineer convinced him he was a natural. By
coincidence, a brochure for a Toronto drama school had arrived
at the station not an hour earlier. The novice signed up, and
soon won a scholarship to study at the Neighbourhood Playhouse
School of the Theater in Manhattan.
Mr. DOOHAN was taught by Sanford Meisner, whose eponymous technique
of self-investigation was heavily influenced by the great Russian
director Constantine Stanislavsky. Others attending the school
in those years included Lee Marvin and Leslie Nielsen, a fellow
Canadian who became a close friend.
A versatile performer, Mr.
DOOHAN did not want for work. From
1950 to 1958, he appeared in, by his count, 450 live television
broadcasts and 4,000 radio shows, shuttling from New York to
Toronto. He was called Canada's busiest actor. He starred in
Flight into Danger, an hour-long television drama aired on Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation's General Motors Theatre in 1956. Mr.
DOOHAN portrayed a traumatized fighter pilot who takes over the
controls of a commercial airliner after both pilots are incapacitated
by food poisoning. The script was the first written by Arthur
Hailey, a British émigré who settled in Canada after the war
and went on to write such blockbusters as Airport and Hotel.
A role as an agent on the television series Treasury Men in Action
evaporated without explanation soon after director David Pressman
was identified as a Communist. Only later did Mr.
DOOHAN learn
he had lost the gig to an actor who secretly accused him of being
a Red.
In 1963, Mr.
DOOHAN appeared as a defence attorney in his first
feature film, The Wheeler Dealers, a romantic comedy starring
James Garner and Lee Remick, directed by Edmonton-born Arthur
Hiller. Meanwhile, his list of television credits reads like
an anthology of cult hits. He appeared in episodes of Bewitched,
Ben Casey, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Outer Limits, The Twilight
Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Voyage to the Bottom of the
Sea.
The three-year run of the original Star Trek series cemented
the actor's image in the public mind as a blustery but dependable
miracle worker in a red uniform. He was paid just $850 U.S. per
episode in the inaugural season.
A cast so familiar now -- with William
SHATNER, another Canadian,
starring as Capt. James T. Kirk; Leonard Nimoy as the logical
Mr. Spock, a pointy-eared Vulcan; and DeForest Kelley as the
crusty Dr. Leonard H. (Bones) McCoy -- won only a modest audience
at first. The series lasted just three seasons, two years short
of the Enterprise's promised "five-year mission to explore strange
new worlds."
The low-budget series allowed for strong characterizations, which
in part explains Star Trek's success in syndication. The series
became a phenomenon, sparking an industry of collectables and
conventions. Fans memorized large chunks of dialogue. Among the
engineer's most repeated quotes: "The best diplomat that I know
is a fully loaded phaser bank."
Mr. DOOHAN often failed to mask his antipathy for the star's
hammy acting. The kindest praise he offers for Mr.
SHATNER in
his autobiography is a grudging acknowledgment that one episode's
performance was "pretty okay."
The Scotty character was not often the focus of plot twists,
although in an episode titled The Changeling, Bones leans over
the engineer's body to deliver the shocking line, "He's dead,
Jim."
Happily, the engineer is revived before hour's end.
In The Trouble with Tribbles, perhaps the best-loved of all episodes,
Scotty disobeys captain's orders and precipitates a bar brawl
with Klingons. The episode concludes on a pun ad-libbed by Mr.
DOOHAN, after he dispatches a growing horde of furry creatures
to a Klingon ship. "I transported the whole kit 'n' caboodle
into their engine room," he tells the captain, "where they'll
be no tribble at all."
Cancellation left Mr.
DOOHAN unemployed and, he feared, unemployable.
He complained of being typecast to his dentist, who said, "Jimmy,
you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you,
I'd go with the flow."
He did so, reprising his role as Scotty in seven films. In Star
Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the engineer attempts to give voice
commands to a 20th-century computer, including speaking into
a mouse. Audiences roared with laughter.
After surviving a massive heart attack in 1989, Mr.
DOOHAN seemed
ever more frail. He deferred questions about the rumoured deterioration
of his health by quipping: "If I had Alzheimer's I think I'd
remember."
What would be his final public appearance came last August at
a five-day event in Los Angeles billed as "Beam me up, Scotty
one last time." He posed in his wheelchair in front of his
star along the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
James DOOHAN was born on March 3, 1920, in Vancouver. He died
on Wednesday at home in Redmond, Washington., a lakeside suburb
30 kilometres east of Seattle. Alzheimer's disease was one of
many afflictions he suffered, including diabetes, lung fibrosis
and Parkinson's. He was 85. He leaves his wife, Wende
BRAUNBERGER,
and their three children, Eric, Thomas and five-year-old Sarah.
He also leaves four adult children -- Larkin, Deirdre and twins
Montgomery and Christopher -- from his 15-year marriage to Janet
YOUNG, which ended in divorce in 1964. A marriage to Anita
YAGEL
in 1970 ended in divorce two years later. Space Services Inc.,
a Houston-based company, will send his ashes into space, as he
requested.
Toronto Trekkies will gather tonight at the Auld Spot Pub, 347
Danforth Ave., where fans can sign a condolence book to be presented
later to the family.
2005-0-7-23
DAWSON,
Nora -- Dispatch:
By Oliver MOORE,
Saturday,July 23, 2005, Page M4
Wielding a chainsaw into her mid-80s and riding her bicycle around
Toronto a few years after that, Nora Claire Elizabeth
DAWSON
was not one to sit still.
Relatives describe a woman who took hiking trips to the Alps,
bought a computer at 85 so she could trade e-mail messages with
a grand-nephew in Panama and insisted that her relatives have
certain tools on hand, for when she came over.
"When she came to visit us, she'd get the pruning shears and
work in the garden," said Dan Walker
DAWSON, a nephew who lives
in London, Ontario
Her niece, Georgie Dawson
DOCKER, tells a similar story. "She
would arrive here, aged 85 and up, with her chainsaw and loppers,
and she'd be up on the ladder pruning whether you liked it or
not," said Ms.
DOCKER, who now lives in Dunnville, Ontario
She was physically vigorous and capable, her relatives say, but
she was also a well-educated and intellectually active woman.
She did The Globe and Mail's cryptic crossword every day until
she was 90.
Ms. DAWSON graduated from the University of Western Ontario,
in her hometown of London, at only 17 and went on to take a master's
degree at Laval University. But when she submitted her work,
they gave her a doctorate instead.
As a young woman she moved to Toronto to teach French. She lived
in North Toronto and then North York as she moved through a succession
of schools including Havergal College and East York Collegiate
Institute. She was head of languages at King and Wexford Collegiate
Institutes. She was also closely involved in the Women's Musical
Club of Toronto, though she didn't play an instrument herself.
Ms. DAWSON did not marry. She died early last month at 92. She
leaves two nephews, a niece, and six grand-nephews and grand-nieces.

YAGERLINE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-03-21 published
LELAND,
Reverend▼Charles▼Wallace,▼ C.S.B.
Died on Friday, March 18, 2005 at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto.
Father LELAND is survived by his sister and brother-in-law, Corrine
and Jack BARGER and their children, Susan
SCHMIDT,
Lisa▼TRELOAR
and David BARGER.
Father▼Charles▼LELAND was born in South Bend,
Indiana on March 22, 1928,
son of Wallace
LELAND and Alberta
YAGERLINE. He attended Culver Public School and Culver Military
Academy, graduating in 1946. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio,
University of Oslo and Oxford University (Wadham College). Father
LELAND devoted his entire religious life to scholarship at the
University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto.
After a long and successful career as a professor, he retired
in 2000 and accepted an appointment to Orsini House, a retirement
residence of the Basilian Fathers. He was an accomplished and
admired academic. His courses were always well attended and appreciated.
As a scholar, he published material on Ibsen and other dramatists
and translated some of their works. His knowledge of renaissance
English Literature and history was extensive. As a teacher, he
was conscientious and showed the same sensitivity, concern and
understanding toward his students as he did toward his confreres
and others. His course in Modern Drama was considered a must
by students, as also were his lectures on Shakespeare and other
renaissance English authors. Friends may call at the Cardinal
Flahiff Basilian Centre Chapel at 95 St. Joseph Street, Toronto,
on Monday, March 21 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. A Vigil Service will
be held in the Chapel on Monday, March 21 at 7: 30 p.m. A Mass
of Christian Burial will be celebrated in the Chapel on Tuesday,
March 22 at 10 a.m. Interment in the Basilian Plot at Holy Cross
Cemetery, Thornhill, Ontario.

YAGERLINE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-20 published
LELAND,
Reverend▲Charles▲Wallace,▲ C.S.B.
Died on Friday, March 18, 2005 at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto.
Father LELAND is survived by his sister and brother-in-law, Corrine
and Jack BARGER and their children, Susan
SCHMIDT,
Lisa▲TRELOAR
and David BARGER.
Father▲Charles▲LELAND was born in South Bend,
Indiana on March 22, 1928,
son of Wallace
LELAND and Alberta
YAGERLINE. He attended Culver Public School and Culver Military
Academy, graduating in 1946. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio,
University of Oslo and Oxford University (Wadham College). Father
LELAND devoted his entire religious life to scholarship at the
University of St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto.
After a long and successful career as a professor, he retired
in 2000 and accepted an appointment to Orsini House, a retirement
residence of the Basilian Fathers. He was an accomplished and
admired academic. His courses were always well attended and appreciated.
As a scholar, he published material on Ibsen and other dramatists
and translated some of their works. His knowledge of renaissance
English literature and history was extensive. As a teacher, he
was conscientious and showed the same sensitivity, concern and
understanding toward his students as he did toward his confreres
and others. His course in Modern Drama was considered a must
by students, as also were his lectures on Shakespeare and other
renaissance English authors. Friends may call at the Cardinal
Flahiff Basilian Centre Chapel at 95 St. Joseph Street, Toronto
on Monday, March 21 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. A Vigil Service will
be held in the Chapel on Monday, March 21 at 7: 30 p.m. A Mass
of Christian Burial will be celebrated in the Chapel on Tuesday,
March 22 at 10 a.m. Interment in the Basilian Plot at Holy Cross
Cemetery, Thornhill, Ontario.

YAGNICH o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-03 published
DILLON,
Eva (née
GORVAL)
Eva (GORVAL) of Saint Thomas, on Tuesday, February 1, 2005, at
her home, where she has resided since 1958, in her 86th year.
Beloved wife of Maurice
DILLON and dearly loved mother of Cyndi
MARSHALL of Ottawa, John and his wife
JoanneDILLON of Souris,
Manitoba, Dianne
O'NEILL of Windsor and Lorretta
DILLON-
ROBINETTE
and her husband Maurice
ROBINETTE of Timmins. Dear sister of
Mike GORVAL of Vancouver, British Columbia. Predeceased by 3
sisters Mary
YAGNICH,
VeraMICHLOWSKI, Maggie
KRAC, Bill and
Harry GORVAL.
Loved grandmother of Tyler, Amber, Luke, Lexie,
and Holly. Sadly missed by a number of nieces and nephews. Eva
was born in Creighton on April 6, 1919, the daughter of the late
John and Tekla
GORVAL.
She owned and operated The Eva Gorval
Beauty Shoppe. She was a member of the Holy Angels' Church and
the Catholic Womens League. Resting at Williams Funeral Home,
45 Elgin Street, Saint Thomas until Saturday morning and then to
Holy Angels' Church for Mass of the Christian Burial at 10: 00
a.m. Spring interment in Dublin Cemetery. Visitation Friday from
2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Flowers gratefully declined, with remembrances
to the Holy Angels' Church Restoration Fund. Prayers will be
recited at the funeral home on Friday afternoon at 4: 00 p.m.